Pride and Prejudice

Elizabeth Bennett is young, clever and attractive, but her mother is a nightmare and she and her four sisters are in dire need of financial security and escape in the shape of husbands. The arrival of nice Mr Bingley and arrogant Mr Darcy in the neighbourhood turns all their lives upside down in this witty drama of friendship, rivalry, enmity and love.



What the critics say



The best-loved book by our best-loved novelist


- Independent



The wit of Jane Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste


- Virginia Woolf



Like Irvine Welsh, I am a great admirer of Jane Austen


- Alexander McCall Smith



Another question I've been regularly asked over the past year is what models I had in mind when writing Curious Incident. Was it To Kill a Mockingbird? Was it Catcher in the Rye? In fact, the book most often in my mind was Pride and Prejudice


- Mark Haddon



An incredibly funny, very upmarket love story with an enchanting heroine and the perfect romantic hero: a tartar with a heart of gold


- Jilly Cooper



Editor's Comments


Pride and Prejudice is probably Britain's most popular classic novel (as the repeated TV and film adaptations prove) and Elizabeth Bennett and Mr Darcy must rank among the best loved literary characters of all time. Jane Austen's ironic wit has seen a resurgence in popularity in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first century and she continues to prove that nineteenth-century novels can still be relevant and amusing despite the immense changes in society over the last centuries.



The Author



Jane Austen was born in Steventon rectory on 16 December 1775. Her family later moved to Bath and then to Chawton in Hampshire. She began writing Pride and Prejudice when she was twenty-two years old. It was originally called First Impressions. It was initially rejected by publishers and only published in 1813 after much revision. All four of her novels published in her lifetime were published anonymously. Jane Austen died on 18 July 1817. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously.